The Blip Report for Friday, March 22nd 2024
Taiwan and the Opium War - part 7
The Early Chiang Kai-shek
I read a very interesting book – ‘The Early Chiang Kai-shek: A Study of his Personality and Politics, 1887 – 1924’, by Pichon P.Y. Loh, that said that Chiang was born in 1887, on October 31st (Hollowe’en), that his father was a salt merchant who died when Chiang was 7, and that, for his mother:
“the birth of Chiang brought her no joy. He was frequently sick, owing to a frail constitution as well as to mischievous horseplay … by the time he was five – and ‘much naughtier than before’ – she apparently had had enough of him and … committed him to a family tutor, sooner than she had intended … Chiang seems to have found neither identification with his father nor affection from his mother.”
“The bond that developed between the widow and her fatherless son was thus characterized by an ambivalent emotional tension that often burst through the veneer of unsteady calm into uncontrollable passions. Unaccustomed to natural parental love during his formative years, Chiang responded to his mother's forced affection with an awkwardness and unnaturalness that often assumed extreme, even contrary, forms. Joy found expression in sorrow; ill-omened dreams marked the height of filial devotion.”
Loh quotes the diagnosis of Chiang by one of his teachers, Mao Ssu-cheng:
“At play, he would regard the classroom as his stage and all his schoolmates as his toys: he could be wild and ungovernable. But when he was at his desk, reading or holding his pen trying to think, then even a hundred voices around him could not distract him from his concentration. His periods of quietude and outburst sometimes occurred within a few minutes of each other: one would think he had two different personalities. I was greatly puzzled by him.”
Loh continues that:
“… from the moment of his birth, Chiang sensed psychological rejection and learned instinctively to be distrustful of his social environment ... it was a cruel world that laughed at the one thing that was his, his physical appearance ... He was incapable of responding normally and in due proportion to a wide range of emotional situations.”
Chiang wrote of himself that:
“In my youth I was naughty and dull-witted and would not subject myself to rules and regulations. And also, because of my humble origin, I was frequently discriminated against and rejected. Having reached manhood, I determined to go abroad for a military education.”
After failing the civil service examination, he sought out a career in the military, and he attended the Short-term National Army School, in Hopei, in 1907, and after passing the examination to be sent for further training to Japan, he arrived in the spring 1908 at the Shimbu Gakko in Tokyo. He graduated at the end of 1910, and then was assigned to the 13th Field Artillery Regiment of the Japanese Army for a year, before he returned to China in 1911.
Loh quotes Tang Leang-li:
“He hurried back to Shanghai, and was at once commissioned by Ch'en Ch'imei, the revolutionary Tutuh [governor] of Shanghai, who was also a Chekiangese, [from Zhejiang province] to command the 83rd Brigade, a band of some 3,000 men recruited from the riff-raff of Shanghai.
He gave his band a severe training, but soon he abandoned himself to a life of intense dissipation. He would disappear for months from headquarters in the houses of singsong girls, and for some reason or other he acquired a fiery, uncompromising temper which weighed very tryingly on his friends.
It was during this period that he became friendly with Chang Ching-chiang, who was to become one of the most sinister characters in the Revolutionary Movement. He also came into contact with the leaders of the secret societies in Shanghai [i.e. the Green Gang], which later on became very useful to him in his dealings with the Shanghai capitalists.”
Here is where Chiang found his future sponsors, like Chang Ching-chiang, Huang Jinrong and the Green Gang.
It was also in Shanghai, that
“Not long afterward, Chiang took it upon himself to ‘liquidate’ T'ao Ch'eng-chang, an influential leader of the Restoration Society (Kuang-fuhui) in the Shanghai-Chekiang area and a potential threat to the authority of Ch'en Ch'i-mei.”
Chiang soon fled back to Japan, but by the end of the year, 1912, he returned to Shanghai and would take a concubine named Yao, with her young child, back to his mother’s home in Chikou.
“It was one big happy family: his tyrannical mother, his forlorn wife and bull-headed son, and the exquisite Yao.” [The Soong Dynasty, by Sterling Seagrave, pg. 161]
Chiang had been married at age 14, by parental arrangement, to a village girl named Mao Fu-mei, and just before Chiang left for Japan, they had a son Ching-kuo.
“According to the young woman’s own testimony, Chiang treated her violently and frequently beat her. She was doubtless relieved when he left.” [ibid, pg.155-156]
Later, Chiang
“divorced his original village wife, cast out the chambermaid concubine whom he had only recently installed at the family homestead in Chikou, and married Miss Chen” - a harlot named Chen Chieh-ju. [ibid, pg. 164]
But by 1921, Chiang was planning a strategy for arranging a marriage to May-ling Soong, Madame Sun Yat-sen’s younger sister.
When Dr. Sun asked Madame Sun about this:
“she was scandalized. She would rather, she hissed, see her little sister dead than married to a man, who, if he was not married, should have been to at least one or two women in Canton alone.” [ibid, pg 165]
Aaahh … but being married to Dr. Sun’s sister-in-law would better help Chiang to appear as the heir-apparent to Dr. Sun, during his grab for power after Dr. Sun’s death.
While it was described as a marriage of convenience, May-ling would eventually fall in love - with Chiang’s newly-acquired wealth and power.
[Some say that they deserved each other!]